


the same faces in a different story

by theredhoodie



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe, F/M, Light-Hearted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 23:44:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5804965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theredhoodie/pseuds/theredhoodie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neither Clarke nor Bellamy understand what happened in that little cave with the little spring. They know what they saw, but there is no way it was real. Or was it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	the same faces in a different story

**Author's Note:**

> This was spurned from a tumblr post that said something like “we just caught our alternate universe selves making out and now everything is super awkward” and this sort of happened. It's been a while since I've been totally happy with a fic, so I hope you enjoy this! It has no canon timeline, though maybe season 1 or early season 2 or just some random timeframe that doesn't really change anything about this fic.
> 
>  
> 
> Lightly edited by me, I apologize for any mistakes.

Bellamy keeps moving his head around, his eyes skipping over Clarke. She keeps fidgeting in her seat, rubbing her palms with her fingertips and sighing. They sit like this for a full ten minutes before Bellamy speaks, his words sharp and stabbing, breaking the quiet like a gunshot:

"So…that happened."

Clarke nods, bites hard on the inside of her cheek, and forces herself to look at him. His hair is messy, she can't tell if he's gotten more freckles or if it's just dirt, and his eyes are clear and strong when they finally settle on her own.

"That happened," Clarke says slowly, a little crease growing between her eyebrows.

Bellamy lets out a puff of air that sounds a bit like "heh" and stands up. He stretches and rubs the back of his neck. The trees are high and proud around them. The sky is open and filled with early stars and slowly moving satellites.

They are on a supply run. They hadn't intended on stumbling on…whatever it was they stumbled on.

"Um…what exactly just happened?" Clarke asks finally, once Bellamy's pacing gets too annoying to handle. She wants to stand too, to shake out her limbs, maybe go for a walk on her own, but she's afraid that if she does, she'll end up bumping into him.

Bellamy, who has been running on near empty and taking every day an hour at a time since they landed on this planet, shrugs his broad shoulders and stops pacing to wave a hand in her general direction. "I don't know," he confesses. He doesn't know a lot of things, and he's used to making it up as he goes along, but this time? He has nothing for her.

Clarke opens her mouth to say something snarky, but instead, she sucks in a sharp breath and hums.

Just when she thought that Earth couldn't get any stranger—with its numerous tribes of humans, its grotesquely mutated animals, and the sense of freedom that came with having her feet on solid ground—this had to happen.

She still isn't sure what exactly what _it_ was. She is with Bellamy on this one.

They were simply walking through the woods toward the fancy X on their map snagged from Mount Weather, and then the ground gave away. Clarke slipped first, through mud and slimy undergrowth. Bellamy called her name on instinct when she yelped and went sliding down the sloped cliff with her, colliding with the bottom. Her boot made contact with his jaw—even now she can see the bruise under the dying sunlight and small flickering fire—and his elbow landed right in her gut.

Once they got to their feet, they found that they were far off track and there was no way to get back up the cliff: it was too wet and muddy to find good footing.

"Well this is _great_ ," Clarke muttered, standing and grimacing as she tried to rub her hands clean on her mud-coated clothes.

Bellamy assessed the situation and spotted a cave entrance surrounded by bright green moss and small flowers. "Over there," he said, moving forward stiffly. "I hear water. A stream…"

"Probably a spring," Clarke offered, falling into step beside him. She had a knife attached to her hip and Bellamy had a single rifle slung over his shoulder. She had the backpack, filled with a few essentials for a two-day trip.

Bellamy went in first, ducking low and holding onto the gun in case there were Grounders inside.

"It's clear," Bellamy said. He spoke softly, his voice echoing off the walls.

It was small and damp in the cave, and it indeed had a natural water spring inside. A little bit of light came from the cave opening. Clarke walked forward carefully, kneeling down to dip her hands in the water to clean them. She settled back on her heels to let the dirt settle before scooping up some water to drink.

Bellamy shuffled near her, dipping his hands in too and wiping his face.

"Is…is the water _glowing_?" Clarke said suddenly, dropping the water in her cupped hands. Bellamy opened his eyes and looked. Indeed, it appeared that the water was glowing from within its dark depths.

The first thought through Clarke's head was that they were going to die. They just put this water on their skin, it was something radioactive, and they were going to die.

Bellamy pulled the gun off over his head and put it aside.

"What are you doing?" Clarke whispered angrily.

"It may just be water particles. Tiny glowing microbes. I read something about that once." He wasn't thinking that they were going to die. He was almost immune to the thought of dying: it was going to happen eventually to all of them and he'd rather die in this pretty little cave than in a cramped camp that smelled of a latrine dug too close.

"Bellamy," Clarke warned as he got down to his knees and leaned over the water.

"Shhhh." He squinted to see if he could make out anything like what he had read back on the Ark. He couldn't, but the light was soft and didn't feel ominous. Ignoring Clarke, he reached out a hand, dipping it into the water a few feet from the edge.

Clarke's hand instinctively grabbed onto the side of his jacket. If she hadn't, she wouldn't have gotten pulled in with him.

But once again, they found themselves falling. Something sucked Bellamy into the water, a pull of the non-existent current like hands grabbing him from beneath and he landed with a splash, pushing Clarke along with them.

The water was all bubbles and darkness around them and then it got cold, so cold. Clarke's throat burned and she needed air _now_. She closed her eyes, no longer feeling wet, no longer feeling _anything_ , and then Bellamy made her jump by lightly touching the back of his hand against the back of hers.

She gasped, ready to drown because of it, but found that she was in fact standing on solid ground, no longer wet. She squinted against the sun.

"Holy shit," she heard Bellamy say from beside her.

They were standing in a large puddle on concrete. They were not in the cave, and they weren't back at the Ark crash site. They didn't know where the hell they were.

All around them, there were buildings of brick and concrete and stone. There were sidewalks lined with glass storefronts sheltered by striping awnings. There were a good number of people in suits and jeans and almost everyone was talking on a cell phone. There was a café to their left, and behind them was a small green park squeezed between two three-story buildings.

This wasn't the Earth they knew: this was the earth that their grandparents would remember.

"What's going on?" Clarke asked, her voice hoarse, tears prickling her eyes. She didn't know why. She hastily lifted a hand—it was clean from mud, as was the rest of her—and rubbed them, blaming the bright unfiltered sun.

"I have no idea…" Bellamy trailed off. No one was paying them any mind, but they were in the middle of the sidewalk. The puddle stretched over most of it and some people walked around it, while others sloshed through. Bellamy pushed Clarke closer to the café side of the building and she moved with little prodding.

Her head was reeling. Had they died? Is this what Heaven looked like? Was this the afterlife?

"Bellamy!"

The voice that yelled was hers and yet she hadn't spoken. Bellamy's eyebrows furrowed and he turned to look behind him as Clarke leaned to the side to peer around him.

Rushing toward them was…her. The same face, the same eyes, the same yellow hair—though this girl's was pulled into a messy braid—and Clarke felt her stomach turn.

"Wait," she hissed, digging her nails into Bellamy's arm to stop him from turning around. Clarke watched the other girl—she was wearing a green dress and brown lace up boots, neither of which Clarke could ever have pictured herself wearing—turn and jog into the park.

"It's…she's…she looks just like me," Clarke whispered, scared to talk loudly or to call attention to themselves.

"Hey, princess," Bellamy's voice came from somewhere in the park.

The Bellamy in front of Clarke frowned and turned his head, pushing closer to her to keep them out of these other peoples' sight lines. Clarke could see them better than he could:

There was the girl in the green dress hoping up and tightening her arms around a shaggy haired young man who held her tightly around the middle and twirled her through the air. From the glimpses that Clarke could see, he looked identical to Bellamy except that his hair was better kept, he had a little scruff around the jaw and he was wearing a light colored button down and blue jeans.

"That's…he looks just like you," Clarke hastened to whisper, not letting go of Bellamy's arms, her fingertips grown numb from clutching at him.

Bellamy twisted and craned his neck to see, catching sight of them a few yards into the park, partially hidden by a small tree. And they were now…

Kissing.

He caught the end of a quick hello kiss, the blonde keeping her hands around his neck. Then he smiled—it was strange to see himself smiling—at the girl who he could tell looked like Clarke just from the shape of her. He caught a glimpse of her profile and was astonished that she indeed looked exactly like the disheveled Clarke who was clutching at his arms in shock.

"I missed you," the girl said, her voice barely carrying to them. She sounded just like Clarke. There wasn't a whine to her words, but a fact being stated.

The other Bellamy's hands settled on her back, keeping her close to him. "I missed you, too." A little more feeling behind that than the girl's words had been. "I was only gone six days."

"Terrible days. Octavia wouldn't leave me alone. She kept checking in on me to make sure I wasn't eating all the chocolate and drinking wine 24/7." The girl grinned. Bellamy could see it from here.

Clarke loosened her grip on Bellamy's arms, but she let her hands stay there, transfixed on the bizarre and alien scene going on between two people that looked just like them.

"She just wants to make sure you're alright with dating someone like me," the man said, almost too soft for Clarke and Bellamy to hear. There was a hint of sorrow in his tone.

The girl in the dress sensed it and smoothed her hands down his chest, then back up to his neck to cup his face. She swiped her thumbs delicately over his cheeks. "Of course," she paused to kiss him, lingering. "I'm alright—" another kiss "with dating you." She leaned into the kiss now, pushing herself up on her toes. His arms tightened around her again as one of her arms hooked around his neck to grip his shoulders. They finally broke it off and she bumped his nose with the tip of hers.

"Clarke," he said, a warning in his tone, but a warm sort of warning like he was still afraid he wasn't good enough for her, but was thankful that she thought he was.

She shook her head and clasped her wrists behind him. His hands were on her waist and she was still standing on her toes. "Don't _Clarke_ me, Bellamy Blake." She shook her head and kissed him again, not giving him time to protest.

In front of her, Bellamy was transfixed and tense. Clarke tore her eyes from the scene to look up at him. There was pain in his stance, something she hadn't expected to see. Clarke was still too shocked to truly focus on the fact that she was watching some other version of herself and Bellamy Blake make out in the middle of a very public park in a world that didn't exist anymore.

"Bellamy," she said softly as he turned away from the scene and closed his eyes. The wrinkle between his eyebrows told her that he was having a conflict of emotion about this.

Before she could say anything else, there was that sucking, dark, cold feeling and Clarke found herself gasping again. Then the water was around them. They were no longer on solid ground. Bellamy sprung to action, squinting into the darkness and seeing bubbles float. Making sure not to kick Clarke, he pushed himself up through the water and came sputtering to the surface.

They bobbled there, getting their bearings, not speaking. Still not speaking, they had gotten out, wrung out their clothes, gathered their things and left the cave. They hadn't spoken the entire time as they walked. They found a campsite, started a fire, taken off their outer layers to try to dry and sat there in silence until Bellamy spoke.

"The water must have had some leftover radiation," Clarke says, needing to find the logic in this. "We were hallucinating."

Bellamy arches an eyebrow and sits back down across from her on the other side of the fire. "How come we both hallucinated the same thing?"

Clarke scowls at him for ruining her one hope at making this all okay. She has been too busy surviving to think of another boy. Finn was an enormous mistake that she hopes she'll never make again, and Bellamy wasn't even on her radar like that.

Until now. Or maybe she is just now letting herself ponder the possibility. The other her…the other Bellamy, they looked happy. They looked like her and Bellamy but in a better world where they didn't have to deal with Grounders and poison gas storms and human massacres.

She wouldn't even stretch it to say that they looked like they were in love.

"They looked happy," she says finally, avoiding his gaze and looking into the fire.

He's staring at her now, not taking his eyes off of her. He is trying to find differences between the girl in front of him and the one he'd seen in whatever that cave thing had been. This Clarke has a small scar on her chin, a natural tan, messier hair, is a little bit thinner, and she has a sharp set to her mouth that he hadn't seen on the other Clarke. She had been smiling the whole time.

"Yeah," he says, because it was true and doesn't know what else to say.

Clarke snatches a glance at him, focusing on his lips for a moment before shaking her head and moving off of her small raised seat. "I'm going to sleep," she says, settling down on the ground.

They probably won't be attacked, but Bellamy says he'll take first watch anyway. He stands and paces and finally settles against a tree trunk until the fire dies down. He doesn't have to move to see Clarke's face, less guarded in sleep, if not a little scratched from the fall off the cliff.

He wonders, for a brief moment, what it would feel like to make her smile the way the other Bellamy had.

It is a stupid thought and he instantly scoffs and tilts his head back. He tells himself to get ahold of himself. He has more important things to focus on than that.

That doesn't stop him from catching himself gazing at her in the low glow of the fire and wondering how she'd look in a green dress, how she'd feel in his arms for more than a brief moment.

He shakes his head. "It was just a hallucination, Bellamy," he tells himself.

He remains unconvinced.


End file.
